Jeff Westover

Name Games of Family History

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Our ward is headed to the Temple this weekend, a combination of Ward Temple Night and Youth Baptisms. I volunteered some family names for the kids to do, forgetting that the well was temporarily dry for baptisms. We’ve been doing a lot of baptizing the past several months.

I so spent some evening hours this week working to see if I could come up with some names. My mother’s side has thousands and thousands of names but over the years both my brother’s wards and my Mom’s wards and stakes have raided the stockpile – and I was fresh out of baptisms.

I have come to rely on two very important family history elements when it comes to temple work: prayer and dreams.

Since becoming so heavily involved with family history I have experienced a change in my dreams. It is such that even my wife comments on it because I guess I’m a vociferous dreamer.

I cannot and do not lay claim to any kind of spectacular or direct experiences in my dreams.

Unlike some, I have never had a dream of an ancestor I never personally knew.

I dream of my grandparents frequently and I always enjoy those dreams even if I cannot make sense of them.

Earlier this week I dreamed of my Mom’s step father, Pat Caldwell.

He and I were very close in the years before he returned home to Louisiana. This most recent dream was more about a car and in the dream this grandfather was telling me he needed a car that could hold more of his family.

Like him, I have a weakness for big cars – so there was nothing unusual about this dream.

I hadn’t really done much work on his family so when I sat down after work one night this week I felt that maybe I needed to take inventory of what was done.

After all, it’s possible. I don’t know if they have big cars in the afterlife but I’m not past using a car as a sign that he wanted family work done, you know?

I found that Mom had done quite a bit, including temple work, for his family.

As so often happens, I lost track of time in reading names, looking for holes, and seeing when and where everyone lived. It gave me yet another look into his background. But my night ended without a single name that could be baptized.

As I thought about that later as I was trying to sleep I realized that I wasn’t really organized or focused in the right way in sitting down to find names.

To be honest, the whole data mining experience of family history is not my favorite.

Finding names, aligning dates, plugging holes in timelines – it is all tedious work.

It requires a detective’s mind and a ton of patience.

That’s just not me, kids.

My love of family history comes from the actual history – the stories. I really enjoy discovering the lives of my family and telling their stories.

But I had made a commitment to supply names for the temple.

I knew there had to be some I could find before this weekend.

I realized I had omitted the most important step of all when I began my name finding experience.

I had forgotten to pray.

So I prayed.

And then I just sat there for a minute thinking about where I should go. On my screen my tree in Family Search was laid out before me. I’ve looked at it so much and worked on it so regularly these past five or six years I’ve come to realize I have actually memorized details on all sides for several generations.

Within a few minutes I felt I should take a fresh look at the Welty family.

My mother’s mother was named Welty. I’ve spent a lot of time on that line in the past year.

They lived in the same area of southwestern New York state for generations. Many served in the Civil War. If they had one common family trait that I could pin point it would be that as adults they never stayed single long.

They married long and if a spouse died they remarried very soon. I had noticed this in several Welty names I had worked on.

They also had some unusual and even beautiful names. One name that I discovered months ago was the female name Glenora. I fell in love with that name the first time I saw it.

As a young married couple I can recall the fun Sandy and I had contemplating potential names for our babies.

We made long lists of names, both male and female. We never learned the gender of our kids before they were born and I think part of the reason why is because of the fun we would have together as we bounced names off of each other.

As a result, each of our children have names we love and spent a lot of time considering – and we’d likely never change the names we gave them.

Family played a big part in naming our kids and there is a story or a connection with each one.

But I’ve often wondered how we might have been influenced had we both been more active in family history during our baby naming years.

The name Glenora might not have been a finalist but it would have made the list.

Glenora Welty is mentioned on only two census records from the 19th century – at least that I have found so far for her.

Her temple work is not done because we don’t have enough verifiable information of her birthdate and she just up and disappears when she was about 7 years old.

She was born in 1869, the 2nd daughter to George and Maria – and her big sister was named Emma, who was just a year older.

I did a fresh search for Glenora and came up empty.

Well, kinda sorta not really.

You see, I noticed something in looking at the 1870 census – a record I had looked at previously.

In that census, when she was only 2, her name is listed as Glencora.

I never noticed that before.

Quickly I made a search for a Glencora Welty – and I came up with zip.

Nothing. Frustrated as ever.

Part of what makes it so frustrating is that George and Maria lived a good long time and we find them on the 1905 state census from New York and Emma is living there still – at the age of 38.

But Glenora or Glencora is nowhere to be found.

For whatever reason, I’ve thought for a long time that maybe she died as a child.

And I thought how horrible that would have been for them as a family.

But then I thought of the names George and Maria gave their kids. They had a son named Willis, and that’s a family name that I’ve seen a few times in the Welty line going back.

It made me wonder if the names Emma or Glenora or Glencora were in some way inspired by their families.

As I pondered that I began looking back.

George was the son of Jacob Welty, the eldest son and 3rd child of eight in this family.

George was also a Civil War veteran, being in his early 20s during the war.

I had been to this family record dozens of times over the past few years.

George and Maria married right after the war in 1864 or 1865 and I never looked for George again in Jacob’s house.

But I noticed for the first time a link to the 1870 census for Jacob and I began to wonder just how many of the Welty’s eight children were still there.

To my shock, I find on that census that George had a new little sister. She was born just before George left for the war.

Her name was Cora.

Is it possible this sister was the inspiration for naming a daughter Glencora?

I don’t know.

But I thank little Glencora or Glenora or whatever her name really was.

Because Cora Welty was quite a find.

Cora married when she was about 20 and her name become Cora Kinney. She had two children.

Something happened to her spouse and Cora remarried a widower who was some 20 years her senior. She had two more children with this new husband.

And of course, all these children got married and had families.

Suffice it to say there are plenty of new family names headed to the temple for baptism this weekend.

And I have a mystery on my hands I just have to solve. Almost all of Glenora’s family has been to the temple – including now her Aunt Cora.

I’m sure they’re together. And I want Glenora to know – we will NOT forget her. We will find her. Her name, whatever it really is, is permanently on my brain and in my heart.

Westovers in Rexburg
Jeff Westover

Land and Legacy: The William and Ruth Westover Story

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William Ruthven Westover only lived to be 42 years old. Those of us who are older than that do not have much of a problem remembering 42 years of time. It just is not that long.

But for a man who lived such a short life William sure had to learn the lessons of patience that come with waiting long periods of time.

From histories that have long existed we know that William and Ruth had to wait seven long years to marry. And we learned that one of his last mortal acts before he died was turning in the paperwork to complete his claim in Rexburg putting the Westover ranch at last in the Westover name. For whatever reason, William had to wait 13 years to complete a 5 year claim.

What we don’t know from those histories was why William had to wait so long for these things to happen. Those questions we answer in our newest video, presented below.

I was really hesitant to put William’s name on our project list this year, though he falls into the line of natural progression we have pursued with these videos. I hesitated because I wasn’t confident we could find enough information about him and his life to really even make a video.

I was wrong.

While we do not have a journal and really even lack much in the way of direct evidence of William’s life and activities I learned a huge lesson in perusing the histories of those around him to build the story we tell in the video.

We tend to forget that the world was smaller then. Lives of family and neighbors affected each other in significant ways and never was that more true than in the life of William Westover.

For William as a boy and a young man it meant doing the work of the head of the house. Due to his family’s circumstances William was thrust in to the role of provider. This was the reason why William and Ruth waited to marry. Without William’s work his siblings and cousins simply did not eat.

Surely William and Ruth wanted their own place so that they could raise their own family. For whatever reason they chose to wait to marry until a time when they could leave Mendon. Once they married that is exactly what they did.

When they moved to Rexburg it was once again due to a family situation. William and Ruth moved to help his big sister Emma’s husband, Walter Paul.

In the research of this story I came to really love both William Westover and Walter Paul. These men were separated in years and in talent. But they were connected through marriage and the land they pursued together.

William didn’t have to take a quarter claim from Walter in order to have a farm. He could have simply filed his own claim with the government. There was plenty of land to go around. But he did it to help his sister and brother-in-law and their large family.

This is what families did in those days. This is what William had done all of his life.

William took a quarter claim because both he and Walter knew he could develop it. It was a desperate situation that took years but William eventually conquered the task.

Another man who took another quarter claim from Walter was not as successful. One history of Walter Paul suggests that the struggles of the quarter claims worked by William and this other man led to Walter Paul’s financial disgrace. That history suggests some bitterness over those circumstances.

I did not find evidence of that.

The newspaper clippings and court records that exist suggest that nobody in Rexburg escaped the financial turmoil of the times. The years 1893 and 1894 were times of panic and financial depression. Country-wide many were affected and many were destroyed. Those living in remote Rexburg, Idaho suffered greatly.

Walter Paul was a high profile public figure in Rexburg. He was the Justice of the Peace, the Coroner, a president of a Quorum of Seventy, a leading figure in the first local theater and a prominent merchant in a furniture store and a hardware store. While he had a large family with many older children who worked hard too Walter and Emma did not keep a farm.

William and Ruth worked their property. They had at first a small dugout home and then later a house that was built on the ranch property. They worked for years to bring successful crops and that only came after building canals to bring water to the property.

The other claim, for whatever reason, didn’t develop and didn’t prosper. When Walter had to file for bankruptcy for his in-town businesses his farm land north of town was thrown into jeopardy. It languished in the courts as administrators at the land office debated what to do with the land in settling Walter’s affairs. Their indecision was complicated by the fact that one quarter of Walter’s claim was productive and the other was not.

Stipulations of the Homestead Act of 1862 stated that 10 acres of the 160 acres had to be started within 6 months. That’s the part most are familiar with. But when you divide a claim as Walter did you fall under a different set of rules. These rules put all the effort that William and Ruth were making at great risk of loss.

The answer that came to Walter was the result of his work as coroner. The town of Rexburg had a cemetery closer to its center in 1893 but nobody was happy with it because it was filled with lava rock that made it very difficult to manage. It was hard to dig in and placement of graves was haphazard. Rexburg officials were looking for an alternative spot for the town cemetery.

It was Walter’s suggestion, as a settlement to the court issues surrounding his bankruptcy, that he donate the unproductive quarter claim to the city for its cemetery. This was a suitable solution to most associated the case – except for federal land office administrators. They still wanted William’s portion.

A compromise was struck only when William agreed to file anew, a commitment that basically required him to start over in waiting another five years before the land could officially become his.

Of course, William was not sick when this deal with struck. But knowing the end of his story – and the story of what the ranch came to mean to his children and grandchildren – well, it makes the ranch that much more important to me today.

As I’ve stated before, I did not grow up with the Westover Ranch in my life. That was a place of the stories of my grandfather. Only in recent years have I visited the ranch and have invested myself in it emotionally.

Learning William’s story draws me closer than ever to it. To me, it is sacred ground.

In fact, I would even tell you that I’ve entertained thoughts of purchasing plots in the Rexburg cemetery for my family because I want dearly to be so associated with the Westovers (and the Pauls) that are buried there.

This, once again, shows the power of digging into our ancestor past.

William is, like his father, a man I want to know and to converse with. As men of this earth we have little in common beyond our last name. But as children of God and as family to each other I value the lessons of their lives and the sacrifices they made for me and for my children to follow.

At the end of the video you will see a list of all the histories we used in producing this story. Reading these histories give me a new appreciation not only for those the histories are about but also for their children and grandchildren. These individuals are the grandparents and great grandparents that I’ve known growing up – people I have admired and looked upon with wonder for their goodness.

These are all amazing generations. I am glad to know them beyond just names on paper. They inspire me to try to be a better person.

Jeff Westover

Grandma Sophie’s Pioneer Story

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It is Pioneer Day weekend here in Utah. Each year around the 24th of July Utah pioneers are featured, celebrated and remembered.

We have many pioneer stories in our family history. To me one of the most compelling is the story of Grandma Sophie.

Grandma Sophie was not a Westover. Her granddaughter, Mary Ann Smith, married Arnold Westover, son of William and Ruth Westover.

Her story is part of many Westovers, however. And on this Pioneer Day we think it is important to share her pioneer experience.

Sophie was from Denmark. There she lived and married a man named Peter Pedersen. They had seven children together before a terrible disease took Peter’s life. This, of course, threw Sophie’s life into chaos. Death had already robbed her of two of her young children and now she found herself a widow.

In the days following his death Sophie grieved and dreamed a dream. In her dream she saw two men carrying suitcases and an angel in the dream told her the men were coming with a message for her from the Savior. Weeks later, as she hanging her laundry out on the line, she saw two men at a distance, both carrying suitcases. Instantly she recognized them from her dream. As they drew closer she rushed to them and asked, “What is it that Jesus wants me to know?”

This is where Sophie’s pioneer story begins.

These Mormon elders taught Sophie and baptized her and those children in her family who were old enough to join the Church. As she accepted her Church membership she was promised that if she stayed faithful she would have the privilege of shaking hands with a prophet of God.

She moved and sold her property, preparing her family as many other Mormons did to “come to Zion” in America. With her five remaining children, all of them very young, she boarded the ship Thornton on May 4th, 1856.

Immediately tragedy struck for Sophie. Her 8 year old son Thomas fell from an upper deck and broke his neck, killing him almost instantly. He was buried at sea.

After arriving in the United States the company she was traveling with became the Willie Handcart Company — and already you know much of the rest of her story.

Oddly enough, of all the tales told of members of that company Sophie’s story is relatively unknown. But her situation was just as desperate and the outcome, for her and for her remaining four children, was just as big a miracle. She experienced it all and with her children survived the trial.

Sophie survived by selling her precious things for items needed for survival. At one point, as food grew scarce, she traded her wedding bands for venison, hiding the meat inside her blouse. The family had their own handcart, powered mostly by Sophie and her ten year old son, Peter. Walking were daughters Emma, age 6 and Hannah, age 4. Three year old Otto was pulled along in the handcart with their belongings.

After arriving in Salt Lake in November of 1856, Sophie and family were taken in by Salt Lake City saints, like most of the other Willie Company pioneers. They were at this point completely destitute of means and spoke very little English.

She was assigned and traveled to Manti in the winter of 1857. On one of her first nights there in that valley she attended a meeting presided over by President Heber C. Kimball. Also attending that meeting was a man who joined the other Manti saints who had gathered for the occasion. His name was Albert Smith.

President Kimball very plainly told the story of those Danish pioneers who had been relocated to Manti. He explained that many of the women of those fall companies were left widowed and they needed volunteers to take them on.

Albert had already had one experience with plural marriage and it wasn’t a good one. He was hesitant to do it again. However, feeling compelled by the Spirit, he raised his hand to help. Albert was then introduced to Sophie. She didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak Danish.

Neither did President Kimball. However, as Heber C. Kimball walked down the aisle of the hall he passed Sophie and then stopped, returned to her and shook her hand. Speaking in English he said, “The Lord is well pleased with you.” Somehow both Heber and Sophie were able to understand each other during this brief but memorable conversation. In later years Sophie would testify that the promise of the elders who baptized her were fulfilled in that meeting when she shook hands with Heber C. Kimball, a member of the First Presidency, an Apostle and a prophet of God.

A short time later Sophie traveled again to Salt Lake, this time with Albert. There they went to the Endowment House and were sealed.

And there the pioneer story of Grandma Sophie really begins. She lived until 1898 and over the more than 40 years she lived in Manti as Sister Sophie Smith she completed a story of love and service that should never be forgotten. She became beloved to Albert, who had many children from earlier relationships and who carried a burden in the community as a farmer, a builder and whose home was a social center for the pioneer community.

Her story overlapped the impressive pioneer story of her husband Albert, who joined the Church and traveled to Nauvoo as a younger man. He later became a member of the Mormon Battalion. Both Sophie and Albert were united by their common testimony of Mormonism and the principles of love it taught was practiced by each in their relationship and their home.

Albert left a detailed journal of his pioneering experience. Sophie did not but she told her stories to her children, the children she bore to Albert Smith, and to their grandchildren. A simple Google search now results in access to different versions of her story passed down through various lines of her family. In fact, these stories have proliferated online over the past five years as more and more family history work has been compiled from different branches of the family. Each story brings a little more detail to the life and service of Grandma Sophie.

I personally learned of Grandma Sophie just four years ago as I was researching her as part of our involvement in an LDS trek re-enactment. As I immersed myself in the study of the Willie Handcart Company and especially when I visited the site of Rocky Ridge, Wyoming — a site of one of the critical nights of the Willie Handcart Company experience — I had one of those spiritual experiences that can only come from doing family history.

I felt her presence there — with me, one of her many grandsons. It was a soft, reassuring confirmation that she was there and made that sacrifice not only for her family but for her conviction. It was as real an experience as I have ever had and I consider it a very sacred moment.

It taught me that even though many of my pioneer ancestors lived their lives with devotion and had no need for my efforts in doing temple work on their behalf that they had testimonies to share with me that would prove of value to me in my day.

That experience changed my life. Now as I work to learn the pioneering stories of every generation on every side of our family history it is with grateful appreciation that I seek them out. I know that in a coming day I will be able to look them in the eye, hear their voices and feel their embrace. I want to know them before I get there.

Jeff Westover

Scouring the History of Others to Tell the Story of William and Ruth

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We’re soon to release a new video telling the story of William and Ruth Westover.

In truth, all of our other efforts have led us to this point.

William and Ruth are kind of a focal point for the many modern generations of Westovers due to the Westover Ranch in Rexburg, Idaho. The ranch was the homestead for William and Ruth and became central to the lives of their children.

Researching William and Ruth has been frustrating.

Although their history is relatively recent as compared to others we have profiled in the videos we produce there is actually very little left or recorded to share of their story.

In many ways they led tragic lives. William as the eldest son of Edwin and Ann was called upon to perform a long family service from around the age of 8.

He stayed in Mendon until he was well beyond the age of being an adult and I am certain it was to support the Findley family property and that of his mother in Mendon.

He delayed his marriage to Ruth by seven long years. Ruth was a local girl, herself a child of pioneer parents. Ruth and William were close to the same age.

While they did forge a life together and grew a large family they didn’t live long enough to see most of their children mature.

William died at the age of 42 of cancer and Ruth died 10 years later – far younger than most of their parents and grandparents.

All this has been known about William and Ruth. I’ve wanted to know more.

I’ve searched everything I can think of. The Church has no record of patriarchal blessings for them. The Rexburg ward records and those in Mendon don’t even mention them. Court and probate records are silent. Other than the few written histories about them that have existed for years and the few pictures we have of them I can find nothing more.

But where I have found some information that I didn’t know before came from indirect sources – through the histories of others who knew them and who associated with them.

I will save it for the video to showcase. But there is one bit of information I want to get out there now about William in particular.

He felt very, very strongly about the land that the Westover Ranch sits on.

How he came to acquire it, what he had to do to work it, and how long it took to happen is a real story that we’re yet to fully uncover.

But what we do know is that he desperately worked to complete his claim and put the property in the name of his family before he died. He filed the last of the paperwork just 8 days before he passed.

Perhaps this is why I heard my grandfather speak with such passion about the ranch.

I never understood it as a kid.

After all, I grew up in California. The ranch was a place from the imagination of my grandfather – a place where his memories had huge significance to him. He mentioned to us many, many times how much he wanted us to go to the ranch and make it a part of our lives.

My Uncle Darrell was no less passionate about it.

I can understand why for them it was important.

The children of William and Ruth – the parents and uncles and aunts to my grandfather and my great uncle – had to stay and fight for that place after their father died.

The family all invested many years and lots of sacrifice for that piece of property – and in the process they became beloved to each other.

I don’t know the history of that land completely since the days of that generation of the children of William and Ruth. I know the property that we call the ranch is now just a part of what it once was to William.

But I know that a later generation of Westovers came together in the 1970s to preserve it as a family gathering place where the legacy of the family could be celebrated and remembered.

I find it inspiring that the great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren of William and Ruth on many sides work to continue to keep the ranch in the family.

I often wonder what William thinks of all this.

Many of his grandchildren and great grandchildren have now passed over and they can no doubt converse. He knows what they did. He is likely aware of what we are doing now in relation to the ranch.

To me, these generations of William and Ruth’s posterity have been wise. Their efforts to keep that piece of dirt in a remote place as a means of remembering who we are and where we come from resonates loudly with me. In many ways, what they have done there is what we’ve tried to do here on this little website.

The ranch helps us to remember who they were. It bears testimony of their goodness, their service and their sacrifice. It is a witness to all that they believed.

Rexburg is an area rich with history of families who staked a place of love and devotion. Many families have their stories rooted there. The Westovers are just one of many.

We have had to delve a little into the histories of others to find more of the story of William and Ruth. They didn’t have the time and they died too young to write much of their story themselves.

But their story has survived, just as the ranch has somehow survived.

We’re finishing that video soon. If you have anything we can add to it – pictures, old letters, journals, any kind of memory of record – I plead with you to contact me so that we can include it.

I think William and Ruth’s story is important to know and to share.

Jeff Westover

Memories of Mom — Evie’s Fits of Giggles with Her Mother

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Evie Westover

Evie Westover

Pictured to the right is Evelyn Riggs Westover — Aunt Evie to many of us. She took to the phone this past week to share with us some thoughts of her mother, Muriel Snow Riggs.

As part of her storytelling she relates a tale of getting into fits of giggles with her mother. I didn’t know this is where Evie gets this wonderful talent.

It delights me to hear her tell this story because it takes me back to a time when Evie would take us to early morning seminary when I was in high school. I couldn’t figure out how she could always be so positive and full of energy so early in the morning and can remember many, many times doing or saying the smallest thing that would, literally, give her fits of giggles.

I can recall one time being at the grocery store with Aunt Evie. She spied a tabloid at the checkout counter with a headline that screamed, “Man Marries Head of Lettuce”. She got to giggling about that headline so bad she could hardly write out her check.

So listen closely to this story as this wonderful talent was one she has had her whole life, and one she apparently shared with her Mom: